Intriguing
fictionalized
true-crime psychological thriller doc creatively
helmed by British TV documentarianBart
Layton, that is more interested in suspense than in
getting to the truth even though it lets us know from
the beginning we are dealing with an imposter. It
mixes interviews with an reenactment of events to tell
the incredible story of a 23-year-old French-Algerian
conman, Frédéric Bourdin,
who poses as a missing San Antonio
16-year-old and gets away with it despite offering no
concrete proof.

In
1994, the disappearance of 13-year-old blond-haired
Nicholas Barclay occurred while walking home in San
Antonio, Texas. Three years and four months later the
police called his mom, Beverly Dollarhide, that her
scared son, without identity papers, was found in
Linares, Spain. The older sister Carey
Gibson (Anna Ruben) flew
to Spain to confirm if it was Nicholas and brings
him home after brainwashed by the imposter to
believe he was abused and snatched by a slave
sex-ring but finally escaped. The imposter tells the
FBI a tale of human experimentation that
resulted in his change of eye color and other physical
changes, to explain why he does not resemble the
missing teen.

The
film is told from the POV of the imposter Frédéric
Bourdin, now 35, who not only did not look
like the missing youth but spoke with a
heavy foreign accent and offered no childhood
memories. How he got away with the scam is
attributed to the victim's family falling for his
act because it wanted so desperately to believe even
if was so outlandish and also because of the
incompetency of the FBI and Interpol agents who
conducted the investigation in such a sloppy way.

Because
of the newspaper exposure, the colorful Texan private
investigator Charlie Parker (Alan
Teichman) becomes obsessed with the
strange case and gathers evidence proving that this
Nicholas is an imposter. This is followed-up by a
Houston child psychiatrist giving his expert opinion
that this is not the missing American kid. Things then
take a twist when the investigating FBI agent Nancy
Fisher (Cathy Dresbach) believes
that the Barclays had an ulterior motive for
so readily buying into the imposter’s story, and opens
a homicide investigation that comes to a dead-end. By
the film's end, you will probably think everyone is a
liar and have no idea what to make of this crazy but
true story.

Bourdin,
a sociopath, in the interview segment
acts like a smug jerk that he got away with his
deception and shows no remorse or concern for the
family he hurt. Last year the film The
Chameleon and in 2008 a New Yorker
piece written by David Grann both used the POV from
the family in recounting in a semi-fictionalized
version the same case. Last year's film failed to
connect with the public, while this version is on its
way to becoming one of those Errol Morris-like
detective procedural cult films.

It's
one of those life is stranger than fiction tales that
ends appropriately in a semi-lucid way with Jimmie
Driftwood singing over the end credits "He Had A Long
Chain On."